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An Israeli start-up backed by Cadbury-owner Mondelez has produced the world’s first lab-grown chocolate bars, the latest “food-tech” breakthrough as the industry seeks to break its dependence on nature.
Celleste Bio said it had created a dozen chocolate bars using “cell-cultured cocoa butter” at Cadbury’s Bournville factory in Birmingham.
The development moves the chocolate industry a step closer towards reducing reliance on cocoa plantations in West Africa, where adverse weather linked to climate change and under-investment have reduced yields and pushed up prices in recent years.
“The question whether we could make real chocolate, real milk chocolate, with cell-cultured cocoa butter is proven: we did it,” Celleste chief executive Michal Beressi Golomb told the FT.
“Unlike other alternatives, it performs identically to conventional cocoa butter. It’s a drop-in replacement . . . so it has a lot of meaning in terms of production processes for the chocolate manufacturers.”
Starting with a couple of cocoa beans, Celleste takes a tiny sample of cells and grows them in large, controlled tanks, feeding them sugars and nutrients so they multiply, producing the same fats and flavour compounds found in the natural product.
Beressi Golomb said the process in effect acted as “the new cocoa tree for the cocoa cells”, giving them “water, sugar and vitamins . . . to let them feel they’re inside a pod on a tree”.
She added that Celleste aimed to secure regulatory approval in the US and Israel in time to enter the market by the end of 2027, with approvals in Europe likely to take longer.
Cocoa prices surged in 2024 and 2025 from less than $3,000 a tonne to a peak of $12,000, squeezing chocolate makers’ margins.
Although they have since eased amid improved yields and declining consumer demand in Europe and the US, chocolate and confectionery companies have poured funding into finding alternative ingredients for sweet treats.
US-based Mondelez is an investor in Celleste, which has raised $5.6mn to date, while Swiss rival Lindt & Sprüngli backs local cell-based cocoa start-up Food Brewer.
Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodities trader, has taken a more immediate approach, partnering with Voyage Foods to distribute cocoa-free chocolate made from ingredients such as grape seeds and sunflower protein.
Meanwhile, UK start-up Win-Win is using fermentation to recreate chocolate’s flavour compounds from cereals and legumes.
The alternatives remain “less than 1 per cent of the chocolate market”, according to industry expert Raphaël Felenbok, “so it’s pretty small but promising. You have a large supply gap, and part of it can be filled with this, part of it can be filled with large-scale cocoa farming, part of it can be filled by just buying at a higher [price] level from smallholder farmers.”
Felenbok, an independent adviser to Win Win’s board, added that lab-grown technologies were “much more of a moonshot” and likely to be “less scalable” than other alternatives due to high energy use, costs and regulatory hurdles.
Beressi Golomb, however, said Celleste was aiming to scale up to produce 50,000 tonnes of cocoa butter a year priced at $12,000-$15,000 a tonne.
Cocoa butter prices stand at roughly €5,000 a tonne, having peaked at more than €40,000 in late 2024, according to Bloomberg data. The world currently consumes about 2mn tonnes of cocoa butter a year.
Beressi Golomb touted the sustainability credentials of Celleste’s product, saying the company aimed “to have facilities next to chocolate manufacturers — imagine like Willy Wonka and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory having pipes of cocoa butter going straight to their facility — so we’re already cutting CO₂ emissions in terms of shipping”.
She added that the company “aims to use renewable energy and to recycle the water”.
“If I compare it to nature . . . we’re replacing 10,000 square metres of land and a lot of waste that is used in the process of cocoa,” she said.
